Gawd Help Me, I am Praising New York Jets Management

Post and Daily News on Same Side

I am not a Jets fan, and as such, it probably makes me more likely to praise the management of that football franchise, but still, this is not something that I would have anticipated doing.

The short version of this is that the owner is saying that he's going to cover the fines for anyoneone on his team kneeling during the anthem:

The Jets are not standing with the NFL in regard to standing for the national anthem.

After the league announced a rule change Wednesday — saying players must either stand for the anthem or stay in the locker room while it is being played — Jets Chairman and CEO Christopher Johnson said the team would support players who might choose to kneel anyway, and not issue any team fines.

“I plan to sit in the very near term with Coach (Todd) Bowles and our players to discuss today’s decision regarding the National Anthem,” Johnson said in a statement.

“As I have in the past, I will support our players wherever we land as a team. Our focus is not on imposing any Club rules, fines, or restrictions. Instead we will continue to work closely with our players to constructively advance social justice issues that are important to us. I remain extremely proud of how we demonstrated unity last season as well as our players’ commitment to strengthening our communities.”

Under the new league rule, if a player does go on the field and protest during the anthem, the team would be fined by the league. The new policy also enables each club to have its own rules if a player is on the field and does “not stand and show respect for the flag and the Anthem.”And, Johnson told Newsday, the team will absorb any league-imposed fines.

“I do not like imposing any club-specific rules,” he said. “If somebody (on the Jets) takes a knee, that fine will be borne by the organization, by me, not the players.

Good for them.

They are doing the right thing, and they are doing the smart thing.

They might want to consider extending this whole, "Doing the right thing and doing the smart thing," bit to the game of Football, where their performance over the past two seasons has been lackluster.

Tweet of the Day

I hope the NFL decides to completely stop all concession stand sales during the anthem as well. We wouldn’t want people buying a $10 beer and an $8 hot dog during our sacred anthem.
All TV camera crews must stop filming and direct attention at the flag too.
Just seems fair.

— Sage Rosenfels (@SageRosenfels18) May 23, 2018

This is in response to the NFL announcing that they are banning players kneeling during the Star Spangled Banner.

What a group of cowards.

And They Have Lost LeBron

Mr. James has described the NCAA as corrupt and beyond fixing:

In the wake of what appears to be a massive scandal breaking in the world of college basketball, NBA icon LeBron James blasted the organization as "corrupt" and beyond fixing, per ESPN.

"I don't know if there's any fixing the NCAA. I don't think there is," James said Tuesday. "It's what's been going on for many, many, many, many years. I don't know how you can fix it. I don't see how you can fix it."

He went on to say, "I don't know all the rules and regulations about it, but I do know what five-star athletes bring to a campus, both in basketball and football,I know how much these college coaches get paid. I know how much these colleges are gaining off these kids. ... I've always heard the narrative that they get a free education, but you guys are not bringing me on campus to get an education, you guys are bringing me on it to help you get to a Final Four or to a national championship, so it's just a weird thing."

The fiction of the "Student Athletes" is little more than slave labor, and the NCAA itself has used forced prison labor as a justification for its practices in court cases.

It needs to be shut down.

The Most Contemptible People in the World

That would be the National Collegiate Athletic Association, which is literally arguing that its "student athletes" are slaves:

In the United States, college athletes — particularly those who compete at some of the largest football and basketball programs — generate not millions but billions of dollars for universities, brands, and television networks. In 2015, the top programs made a combined $9.1 billion. The NCAA, for its part, just signed an $8.8 billion dollar deal with CBS to air March Madness, the college basketball championship tournament.

………

That very obvious dynamic undergirds a lawsuit filed by former NCAA athlete Lawrence “Poppy” Livers asserting that scholarship students who play sports are employees and deserve pay. The Livers case argues that student-athletes who get scholarships should at least be paid as work-study students for the time they put in.

What the NCAA did in response to the lawsuit is as vile as anything going on in sports right now. I had to see it for myself before I believed it. At the root of its legal argument, the NCAA is relying on one particular case for why NCAA athletes should not be paid. That case is Vanskike v. Peters.

Only there’s an important detail: Daniel Vanskike was a prisoner at Stateville Correctional Center in Joliet, Illinois, and Howard Peters was the Director of the state Department of Corrections. In 1992, Vanskike and his attorneys argued that as a prisoner he should be paid a federal minimum wage for his work. The court, in its decision, cited the 13th Amendment and rejected the claim.

The 13th Amendment is commonly hailed as the law that finally ended slavery in America. But the amendment has an important carve-out: it kept involuntary service legal for those who have been convicted of a crime. “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction,” the amendment says. It’s that phrase — “except as a punishment for crime” — which allows American prisons to force their inmates to do whatever work they want or need them to do.

The use of the case stems from several other law cases alleging unpaid labor; two of them are previous lawsuits against the NCAA in which the case was cited as precedent, and the NCAA won.

………

In their response to the NCAA’s motion to dismiss, Livers’s lawyers are arguing that the precedent was mistaken for applying the 13th Amendment exception for unpaid prison labor in a case dealing with non-prisoners.

“Defense Counsel’s insistence that Vanskike be applied here is not only legally frivolous, but also deeply offensive to all Scholarship Athletes – and particularly to African-Americans,” Livers’s rebuttal to the NCAA’s motion says. “Comparing athletes to prisoners is contemptible.”

 The NCAA is showing an incorrigible nerve to use this case, Vanskike v. Peters, as one of its justifications for not paying student-athletes. The Vanskike case has been cited in the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals 14 times before, but in each of those 14 cases there were prisoners arguing that they should be paid a fair wage for their work.

Yet the NCAA wants to rely on this case and to call on the 13th Amendment. The body that runs college sports wants to use a justification for the slave labor of convicted criminals to justify its outrageous greed.

I have an idea for a sporting event, it would involve senior NCAA officials fighting each other to the death.

We could call it the Hunger Games.

About the Only Super Bowl News That Matter

No one took a knee during the national anthem.

Righteous Anger

Burn it all down. That is the calm and reasoned conclusion to which I have come as one horror story after another unspooled in the courtroom. Nobody employed in the upper echelons at USA Gymnastics, or at the United States Olympic Committee, or at Michigan State University should still have a job. If accessorial or conspiracy charges plausibly can be lodged against those people, they should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. Those people should come out of civil courts wearing barrels. Their descendants should be answering motions in the 22nd Century. In fact, I can argue convincingly that none of those three institutions should continue to exist in its current form. USA Gymnastics and the USOC should lose their non-profit status forthwith. Michigan State should lose its status within the NCAA for at least five years. American gymnastics is no longer a sport. It’s a conspiracy of pedophiles and their enablers.

—Charlie Pierce, on the complicity of people with authority at all levels for the pedophile predator Larry Nassar

And that might not be the angriest thing in his Sports Illustrated article.

Cheer the Orioles

The Baltimore Orioles posted a rather innocuous Tweet wishing everyone a happy Kwanzaa.

The flying monkey crowd proceeded to have a butt-hurt hissy fit.

The team's response was to tell the racist Neanderthals to go Cheney themselves:

A common love of the Orioles is what brings everyone together on this page. We’re happy to have a diverse fan base of the best fans in the world. If you cannot show respect for others, kindly unfollow us. There is no room for hate or bigotry on our social media or in our ballpark

— Baltimore Orioles (@Orioles) December 26, 2017

As a Red Sox fan, I cheer the Orioles today.

Tweet(s) of the Day

They both have to do with Russia, and the current hysteria that posits that $100,000 in ads on Facebook somehow trumped the $1,000,000,000 that the Clinton campaign spent.

The first is about bus kiosk ads from RT:

While everyone freaks out about Russian ads, RT takes out more Russian ads pic.twitter.com/Z5eW8GS6pg

— Jane Lytvynenko (@JaneLytv) October 10, 2017

The second one, from the Russian ambassador to the UK, hits the British where it hurts, their 52 year drought in the World Cup:

A football team would be a better option pic.twitter.com/4Psj4ZkGy5

— Russian Embassy, UK (@RussianEmbassy) October 10, 2017

Dayyymmmm! That one is going to leave a mark.

H/t Naked Capitalism.

Adding to the List of They Who Must Not Be Named

Former football coach and tight end Mike Ditka, who just said that, "there has been no oppression in the United States in the past 100 years:

Even before this NFL season, which has featured team owners linking arms with players as shows of solidarity amid sharply critical comments from President Trump, some players were noting that the original message of protests during the national anthem had been largely lost. To them, the cause of bringing attention to racial injustice, in particular police brutality against black men, had been overshadowed by a heated national discussion over the merits of taking a knee during the national anthem.

To former NFL coach and ESPN analyst Mike Ditka, however, that cause made no sense to begin with. In a pregame interview before a radio broadcast of Monday night’s game between the Chicago Bears and Minnesota Vikings, he said, “There has been no oppression in the last 100 years that I know of.”

The Germans have a term for this, Fachidiot, (Google Translate) which refers to an expert who is a complete moron outside of his limited area of expertise.

Thus, I add Michael Keller Ditka to my list of They Who Must Not Be Named, unless he decides to do something like running for office, (please God no) you will here nothing about him from me

Of course, I haven't posted about him before, so carry on.

Not the Onion

The National Review is siding with a black athlete over a white Republican.

I think that this is a sign of the apocalypse:

Americans do not and should not worship idols. We do not and should not worship the flag. As a nation we stand in respect for the national anthem and stand in respect for the flag not simply because we were born here or because it’s our flag. We stand in respect because the flag represents a specific set of values and principles: that all men are created equal and that we are endowed with our Creator with certain unalienable rights.

These ideals were articulated in the Declaration of Independence, codified in the Constitution, and defended with the blood of patriots. Central to them is the First Amendment, the guarantee of free expression against government interference and government reprisal that has made the United States unique among the world’s great powers. Arguably, it is the single most important liberty of all, because it enables the defense of all the others: Without the right to speak freely we cannot even begin to point out offenses against the rest of the Constitution.

Now, with that as a backdrop, which is the greater danger to the ideals embodied by the American flag, a few football players’ taking a knee at the national anthem or the most powerful man in the world’s demanding that they be fired and their livelihoods destroyed for engaging in speech he doesn’t like?

I guess that this falls in the, "Stopped clock," category, but still, the National Review?

We are in Bizarro World.

Quote of the Day

There I was, the black grandson of a slave, the son of a black sharecropper, part of a historic occasion, a symbolic hero to my people. The air was sparkling. The sunlight was warm. The band struck up the national anthem. The flag billowed in the wind. It should have been a glorious moment for me as the stirring words of the national anthem poured from the stands. Perhaps, it was, but then again, perhaps, the anthem could be called the theme song for a drama called The Noble Experiment. Today, as I look back on that opening game of my first world series, I must tell you that it was Mr. Rickey’s drama and that I was only a principal actor. As I write this twenty years later, I cannot stand and sing the anthem. I cannot salute the flag; I know that I am a black man in a white world. In 1972, in 1947, at my birth in 1919, I know that I never had it made.

—Jackie Robinson, in his autobiography.

(emphasis mine)

Don't Normally Comment on Football, but ………

I have commented on some egregious calls calls by the officials, when I it felt that it had to do with the unfair treatment of referees by the league.

This weekend, Donald Trump went after the league because some players kneeled during the national anthem to protest racism, and in solidarity with Colin Kaepernick, who has been shut out of the league by craven management.

Trump tweeted, and the players and owners just told Trump to go Cheney himself:

Some stood. Some kneeled. Some remained in the locker room, choosing to speak through their absence from the NFL’s pregame ceremonies, in which the American flag is displayed and the national anthem sung. But from London to Los Angeles, virtually all NFL players on the sidelines before kickoff of Sunday’s slate of 14 games locked arms with each other in response to President Trump’s three-day campaign demanding that team owners “fire or suspend” players who kneel during the national anthem and calling on fans to boycott games if the form of protest continued.

The silent rebuke to the president, determined independently by each of the 28 NFL teams in action Sunday, represented an unprecedented collective action and show of solidarity among players who battle against one another 16 weeks, some more, each season.

Some, such as the Jacksonville Jaguars, Philadelphia Eagles and Washington Redskins, were joined on the sideline by their team owners, Shahid Khan, Jeffrey Lurie and Daniel Snyder, respectively. Most were joined in standing shoulder-to-shoulder by coaches, staff and, in some cases, police officers.

All but two of the NFL’s 32 team owners and CEOs issued statements Saturday night and through Sunday in response to Trump’s crusade against protesting NFL players, which began in earnest during a Friday night rally in Alabama. After making a thinly veiled allusion to former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who sparked a national debate by taking a knee during August 2016 preseason games to protest police violence against minorities, Trump called on NFL coaches to get the “son of a bitch” players off the field if they continued to kneel. The president repeated his call with no less intensity on Twitter on Saturday and Sunday morning.

………

Among the more notable was New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft, a vocal Trump supporter and a $1 million donor to his inaugural.

“There is no greater unifier in this country than sports and, unfortunately, nothing more divisive than politics,” Kraft wrote in his statement released Sunday morning. “I think our political leaders could learn a lot from the lessons of teamwork and the importance of working together toward a common goal.”

Well done, but Colin Kaepernick has still not been signed. 

I'll wait to hear about that.  (BTW, if the Raven's performance today is any indication, sign him.) 

Clueless Protesters

Some fans in the Monster Seats hung a banner over the wall that said, “Racism Is As American As Baseball.” Security removed them. pic.twitter.com/tVSai9XocY

— Pete Abraham (@PeteAbe) September 14, 2017

Given Boston's history of racism, I'm inclined to think that protesting racism at Fenway Park during a Red Sox game is a good thing.

Boston is NOT a "woke" place, and getting in the face of the town in what is arguably the most Boston place in Boston is a good thing.

That being said, if you do protest, run it by an editor to make sure that your actual words are unambiguous:

Fans draped a sign reading “Racism is as American as baseball” over the Green Monster at Fenway Park during the Red Sox-Athletics game Wednesday night.

Red Sox spokeswoman Zineb Curran replied with the following statement via email when asked about the incident:
“During the 4th inning of tonight’s game, four fans unfurled a banner over the left field wall in violation of the club’s policy prohibiting signs of any kind to be hung or affixed to the ballpark. The individuals involved were escorted out of Fenway Park.”

According to The Boston Globe, the sign was visible for about two minutes and no arrests were made in connection to the incident.

………

One member of the group spoke to CSNNE anonymously Wednesday night, telling the network they expected to be kicked out of Fenway but were surprised by some people’s interpretation that their message wasn’t clear.

“I guess we should have seen that coming, but we also didn’t think of it as an ambiguous message,” the group member said. “It’s kind of telling that it is being interpreted as one.”

When I first heard about this, I thought that it was a group of white supremacists endorsing racism.

For F%$#'s sake, you need to run you slogans by an someone who wasn't involved in drafting the slogan, and maybe a trained copy editor.

To quote a an internet meme, "Get a brain, morans."

Tweet of the Day

BREAKING: All these guys have just been signed by NFL teams as backup quarterbacks. Kaepernick still available. pic.twitter.com/DbglJxrlhf

— Tom the Dancing Bug (@RubenBolling) August 13, 2017

This is unbelievably true.

Headline of the Day

If the NCAA Comes Off Looking Better Than You, Something Is Horribly Wrong

—Charlie Pierce on how the NCAA has seized the moral high ground^* over the North Carolina bathroom bill.

^*Yes, the fact that I can use the term "Moral High Ground" to describe any act by the NCAA, which makes peonage its policy, is a complete mind f%$#.

I F%$#ing Hate Tom Brady

I did not watch the Super Bowl, I was in bed, dealing with a nasty cold, and I really did not care who won the game.

I don't have a problem with his looks, or his wealth, or his celebrity.

I hate him because he can make Sharon,^* a Patriots fan since before the Drew Bledsoe era, scream loudly in ecstasy.

That is MY job, dammit!

^*Love of my life, light of the cosmos, she who must be obeyed, my wife.

Some More Silver Linings

First, we had a historically large (but still small) number of batsh%$ insane district attorneys turfed out of office, because they are sick and tired of abuse of prosecutorial power.  (In Houston, the DA jailed a mentally ill rape victim, and they were given the boot, for example)

Also, in conservative San Diego, voters rejected another huge give away to a pro sports franchise for a gold plated stadium complex.

I hope that both of these are the beginnings of a trend.

It's a little thing, but it is a good thing.

Cold Feet and the End of the World

On Tuesday, I did early voting, and I had cold feet.  ……… Literally.

It was a long line, about half an hour long , with the first 20 minutes being outside, and my feet got cold.

All things considered, the line actually went fairly quickly.

One interesting thing:  when I signed it, the volunteer asked how long it took, and I checked on my phone to get the elapsed time.

I then dropped my phone, which landed on the table with a loud bang, and Everyone in the room jumped.

Poll workers are on edge this year.

As an FYI, since I live in Maryland, so my vote doesn't count, I wrote in Bernie Sanders for President.

As to the end of the world, I'm not talking about Donald Trump, but the fact that the Cubs have won the World Series for the first time in 107 years.

Congratulations to the new champs.

The Nefarious Ammosexual Agenda Forces Its Way into Our Houses of Worship

In Oregon, a girl's softball team in Lake Oswego raffled off an AR-15 to fund a team trip.^*

A pastor there did not like this, and when he found that tickets were already sold, he bought a large number, in the hopes of getting the weapon, and destroying it.

Well, he won the raffle/rifle, and announced his plans, and the gun fondler crowd started issuing death threats and demanding his prosecution:

The Rev. Jeremy Lucas brought an olive branch to a gun fight recently, hoping for a mellow outcome. It began when he won a semi-automatic rifle in a local raffle, then revealed his plan to destroy it and was mostly congratulated for his stand.

But the 44-year-old Episcopal priest’s token attempt to take another gun off the streets did little to keep the peace. In response to his gesture, Lucas got threats and demands for his arrest.

………

Lucas grew up in Alabama owning and shooting guns. But he sees the AR-15, America’s most popular rifle, as a danger to society. It is one of the weapons of choice among today’s mass shooters, from Sandy Hook Elementary in 2012 to the shooting last month of four teens, three fatally, by another teen near Seattle.

………

When news about his win and plans to destroy the gun began to spread, Lucas got Facebook thank-yous from relatives of some of the Sandy Hook victims and encouragement from hundreds of others.

Donors replenished the $3,000 he’d used from the church coffers and then some. Bishop Michael J. Hanley, head of the Episcopal Diocese of Oregon, sent his huzzas as well. “It was a wonderful thing and actually filled me with a certain amount of glee that he could pull it off,” Hanley said in a statement. “Probably more of us need to act in this way, jumping into the unknown consequences of doing good deeds.”

But not everyone saw it that way.

Some unhappy commentators suggested Lucas had violated Oregon’s new gun law by failing to have a background check conducted on a parishioner to whom he’d given the weapon for safekeeping.

Then there were the “critics and trolls” on social media and on news websites, Lucas wrote on his blog, “lobbing their hate and vitriol.”

There are lots of responsible gun owners out there, and then there is the Ammosexual contingent, who shouldn't be trusted with a butter knife.

^*I know what you are thinking, "In Oregon, you must be kidding?" That's because you don't know that Oregon in the 1920s was the most KKK dominated state in the nation.^†
†Oregon's original constitution literally banned black people from the territory.

Yes, Ping Pong Balls are Hazardous Cargo

Don't try this at home. Seriously!

I don't know if you've ever lit a ping pong ball on fire, but it's a rather exciting thing. (I have done so)

They are made from celluloid, the highly flammable material that movie film was once made of, and lighting even one ball can sate the little pyromaniac in many of us.

A truck load of ping pong balls is literally hazardous cargo, which is why the Rio games has moved to "Polyballls", which contain no celluload.

These are not flammable, and they bounce in much the same way, but they are having some durability issues:

The Olympics is apparently dealing with its own version of deflategate.

Matches in Rio de Janeiro have ended with balls that look like they combusted from being smashed — even though players haven’t changed their pressure in any way. It’s a new and frustrating problem in a game marred by hiccups like a green pool and then, a fart-smelling green pool.

That’s because the official balls of 2016 are made of a new non-celluloid material that inhibits durability, says David Brasfield, a customer service representative at Paddle Palace, the official ball supplier of the United States Table Tennis team. What’s worse is that this problem isn’t limited to the DHS ball that’s being used in Rio de Janeiro; all new polyballs are facing similar ball-busting problems.

Despite the growing pains, the switch to non-celluloid balls was practically a necessity because of the severe fire hazard posed by celluloid balls. “We can now have a large quantity of balls come by air quickly, and we couldn’t have done that before,” points out Brasfield; previously, containers of celluloid balls had to be delivered by hazmat trucks with flammable solid warnings plastered all over them.

Mostly though, I am posting this for the the burning vid.  I could watch this all day.

Later, I'll show you a trick with a dry cleaner bag.